Improving the QoS of Bluetooth through turbo coding

Bluetooth has emerged as a viable COTS alternative for military applications involving low power wireless networks, including wireless sensor networks and personal area networks for the foot soldier. However, the reachability of Bluetooth networks is limited by the weak error control coding used by the predefined packets. We propose a method for improving the performance of Bluetooth by using custom error control coding in general, and turbo codes in particular. An important aspect of the proposed technique is that it is compliant with the Bluetooth standard, and therefore requires no hardware modifications. More specifically, the AUX1 user-defined packet is used to transport rate compatible punctured turbo codes (RCPT). The result, as shown by a combination of analytical/simulation results, is a dramatic increase in throughput and decrease in latency at low signal to noise ratios.